The drive to design seems to be found in people from all walks, including those who could easily afford to pay others to solve design problems for them. Celebrities sometimes engage in highly personal design activities without anyone even knowing about it.

When Google launched its “patents” search-engine a couple of years ago, the design blogger Ironic Sans searched through the database and discovered that famous people were quietly designing and making all kinds of quirky things. Among the finds were detailed diagrams, shown here, revealing actress Jamie Lee Curtis’s quest to design the perfect diaper (with a built-in moisture-proof pocket for holding cleanup wipes, see below), as well as rock guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s endeavor to make a “musical instrument support” to prop up his guitar during two-handed solos, and even an elaborate attempt by Gary Burghoff (who played the character “Radar” on M*A*S*H) to engineer something he called… “an advanced fish attractor device.” (To be fair, there are more fish attractors than you would think in the patent db.)

The blogs had some snarky fun with the discovery that famous people were hatching plans to improve the way we live, but it’s somehow refreshing to find that movie stars and rock idols can turn out to be basement Bucky Fullers. Too often, when the words “celebrity” and “design” are combined, what we get is another of those ubiquitous star fragrances or clothing lines that seem to have more to do with leveraging a popular name than satisfying a genuine need (and it’s usually not clear if the star involved did more than attach his/her name to a product). But the Curtis diaper or the Burghoff fish-attractor represents a more authentic kind of design—born of a passion to solve a problem, and evidencing long hours of scheming and sketching in private (until the Google patents site made it all public).

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